Analyst and author Stuart Slade just passed away.
His The Big One books were some of the first “niche” AH (as in, not stuff that you could see in normal booksellers like Harry Turtledove) that I read. For all my criticism of them, they played an undeniable role in getting me into, for lack of a better word, “weird alternate history”. They were among the first pieces of alternate history I read that weren’t from mainstream authors like Turtledove. I liked the weirder gimmicks inside them.
RIP.
Sea Lion Press just released the Alternate Australias anthology of short stories. I’m a contributor to that, despite not really having any personal ties to that country. Oh well. My entry was a short story entitled “The Savannah War Dispute”, dealing with an alternate war in East Africa that Australia intervened in.
So with the release of Blood Vortex, the Harlequin/Gold Eagle era of Mack Bolan concluded. After reviewing that book, I have a couple more thoughts.
The first is that there simply wasn’t much attention paid to it outside the existing fandom. Nader Elhefnawy has commented that in 2015, the rest of Gold Eagle, a once-big imprint, getting folded attracted literally no comment. Likewise for the end of Mack Bolan, and I can add to that by saying the responses to my Blood Vortex review amounted to “Wait they were still making Mack Bolans?” This isn’t surprising, as the series was an irrelevant shell for years and years.
What I find more interesting is how every Mack Bolan movie project has fallen through. Some of this could just be bad luck, but it implies that, for all the success of the books (at a time before visual media could match its visceral qualities), the character was, unlike his inspiration The Punisher, never truly that marketable.
Now for the biggest surprise I had when reading the later, non-Pendleton Bolans. What I’d expected was for the multiple authors to result in the books being extremely erratic in quality, ie comic books. Yet what I found, albeit based on a small sample size, was strangely the opposite. There was a bit of difference in quality, but there was a lot more similarity.
Whatever the author, the Gold Eagle Bolans I’ve read all have had the same issues with a consistency I haven’t seen among cheap thrillers made by different writers in different settings. Nearly all of them would go into ridiculous detail on the character weapons, but would make gigantic mistakes about anything vehicle-based or bigger that one glance at a Wikipedia page could have corrected. All of them felt filled with obvious padding in spite of their short-to-very-short length. All of them had, to one degree or another, stilted and clunky prose. And all of them were jumbled and had huge issues with their plots (even by cheap thriller standards).
I don’t know the reasons why this was the cause. Whether it was the editors pushing it, the authors just getting into a routine (especially given the undoubtedly tight release schedule), or something else, I don’t know. But it was there, and it was one of the things that made me less eager to read them.
It’s strange. The Executioner (which was originally intended as a one-off!) ended up with so many books and so many more it clearly influenced, including a popular Marvel character. Yet so much of it was also disposable throwaway literature, cheap even by the standards of cheap thrillers.
Of all the theorized “what if this successful and physically talented athlete played a different sport” questions, the most interesting, in my eyes, is American football. This is because that sport involves a wide array of roles that each require a different physical quality and skill set.
The least satisfying is baseball, because the skill sets there are not immediately obvious. Yet you can argue that baseball is interesting because it has the most definite stats. Jim Thorpe and Bo Jackson were incredibly strong physically, but neither was more than decent as a baseball player. Looking at Jackson’s batting stats and just his batting stats, you’d see power but a ton of strikeouts and few walks-the sort of numbers you’d associate more with a Dave Kingman-style lummox over a wall-jumping acrobat.
Then there’s Brian Jordan, who was also a football-turned baseball player and was also a low-walk slugger, but didn’t strike out as often as Jackson did. However, there was an aspiring football running back who ended up playing baseball instead. And he was one of the best walk-drawers (and baserunnners, and players in general) of all time. I speak of Rickey Henderson. So I want to say that, for any obviously talented player in another sport, the likeliest path for them in baseball is the “low-walk slugger” approach, but Henderson’s path means you never know.
I’ve read a lot of books of many, many different types, as this blog makes clear. However, there’s one genre I simply have demonstrated no interest in for a long time.
Westerns.
Now, this isn’t a dislike of them, just a personal taste. And as always, personal tastes can change. But my disinterest in westerns has been remarkably consistent for a remarkably long time. While I had to have read at least one western, I can’t remember the title of any off the top of my head. I can remember the title of one that I bought a long time ago, Whiskey River, but also that I didn’t actually read it. This may be the only genre where I’ve seen more movies than read books in. Because I have seen (and enjoyed) the classic Westerns The Magnificent Seven and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
As for why, even I’m a little baffled. But I think it’s because they’re ultimately historical fiction (which isn’t really my favorite) and in a specific historical period that also isn’t exactly the one I’m most interested in.
This could only have been produced in a very short time period, after the Berlin Wall and end of the Warsaw Pact but before the actual breakup of the USSR. Because of this, this RAND report looks interesting, especially in its “long-term” ramifications.
Having an intact, hostile USSR but no Warsaw Pact means that to threaten Germany, it has to move through Poland first, can only put two fronts against Germany directly due to Poland not being that wide (the third has to either be a reserve/second echelon or swing through the Czech Republic), and puts the initial front line considerably farther to the east, with the Oder river being the first big obstacle. It’s an interesting piece.
I like the concept of NaNoWriMo. It’s just a shame that it happens at the worst possible month for me.
So, what happened to the likes of “men’s adventure novels”? If the technothriller declined enormously after 1991, the smaller “men’s adventure” series seemingly just dissolved completely. But now, from my own readings, and from looking at Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction and reviews/commentary of later “men’s adventure” books, particularly on Glorious Trash, I think I might have found it.
They did drop dramatically after the 1980s, and the reason, from pretty much everything I’ve heard and readabout, is economic. They were just too low margin. I should refer you to this post by thriller author Jack Badelaire about the details, and he brings up another reason I agree with, which is that visual media got better.
But whatever the why, what happened? Well, cheap thrillers did not stop being written by any means, as Lee Child can attest. Someone comparing Jack Reacher to a classic men’s adventure hero would find more similarities than differences. But as for those dime novels, the surviving ones sort of – shifted. A look at everything from page counts courtesy of Serial Vigilantes to review commentary to my own study finds three main things.
Yes, what happened is that the men’s adventure book became the “Tom Clancy’s” book.
My mind has recently turned back to Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, the book I used for the 1st Anniversary Review of this blog. That was a great choice, I’ve felt. The book was not only prominent, but mixed in the best possible way-I could really go into detail the way I couldn’t in just a “51% book”, however readable.
In fact, I had some more thoughts on it.
I’ve come across a declassified CIA document from 1972 illustrating a speculative Soviet air campaign in a Cold War turned conventionally hot. Having just emerged from the nuclear monomania of the past decade, it shows the weaknesses of the Soviet air forces in what was new territory for them. Almost everything was either too short-ranged, too vulnerable, carried too small a bomb load for conventional war, or a combination of the above.
That being said, it still would be very formidable to oppose, especially by the standards of “we only need to hold the air above the North German Plain for a few days”.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 